Crime Series That Puts Victims Stories’ First
DEEP LISTENING94 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
BELOW,FROMTOP:^FBI;^ SACRAMENTO^
COUNTY
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OFFICEVIVIEN GOLDMAN was a pio-
neering London punk journal-
ist in the 1970s, covering bands
like the Slits and the Raincoats.
Now an adjunct professor at
NYU, Goldman tells a fascinat-
ing tale inRevenge of the
She-Punks — as she calls it,
“A Feminist Punk History fromPoly Styrene to Pussy Riot.” It’s
the freewheeling tale of how
radical women who could bare-
ly play their instruments ended
up changing the world. “Punk
was exciting and it was doable,”
the Raincoats’ Gina Birch tells
Goldman. “I thought, ‘This is
the beginning of who I am.’ ”
This is not a dry academic
history; instead, it feels like
an exhilarating conversation
with the coolest aunt you never
had. Goldman chases the story
of feminist punk, from first-
wave bands like X-Ray Spex
to riot grrrls like Bikini Kill
and Sleater-Kinney. She goes
thrift-shopping with Patti Smith
and sits on a Jamaica beach
with Grace Jones. Goldman
ventures all over the globe,
chronicling bands from Co-
lombia to Kashmir. (Everybody
knows Neneh Cherry for her
Eighties Brit-rap bass-bombing
hit, “Buffalo Stance” — but
did you know she started out
singing for the Slits?)Revenge of
the She-Punks shows why this
rebellious music survived. But
even more important, it shows
why the genre keeps turning on
new fans today.ROB SHEFFIELDC
OLSON WHITEHEAD’S
previous novel, 2016’sThe
Underground Railroad,
won a National Book Award and
a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a feat
only seven other novels have
achieved. The praise was well-
earned. Whitehead’s story of two
slaves fleeing the Deep South
was a magical-realist odyssey full
of faint hope and inescapable
horror. In his latest,The Nickel
Boys, he further dramatizes the
brutality of the past — this time
the book is set at a racially segre-
gated reform school in Jim Crow
Florida — but with darker, tauter
machinations.
Elwood Curtis is one of the
Nickel Boys, a student-slash-pris-
oner at the Nickel School, where
he was sent for unwittingly hitch-
hiking in a stolen car. Elwood is a
teen with hopes and dreams; it’s
the 1960s, and he’s nearly worn
out his vinyl copy of a Martin
Luther King Jr. speech when he
is sent to Nickel, believing that
a black man can make it in America if he simply
proves his merits and commits to the preacher’s
teachings of love in the face of hate. Soon, Elwood
begins to change his mind. “Violence is the only
lever big enough to move the world,” he thinks after
he receives his first beating.
The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s seventh novel, is
more rooted in fact thanThe Underground Railroad,aking its inspiration from the
ery real Dozier School for
oys in Marianna, Florida.
ugh it is just as concerned
sceral, unbearable
ruelty of the time period it
onicles, and the blank-faced
ss of America, the
ities between the two
ely end there.
The Underground Railroad
as a mournful epic.The Nickel
oys is more tightly wound,
gant piece of storytelling
t feels more claustrophobic,
ss hopeful and harder to findElwood quickly meets Turn-
, another Nickel Boy, though
ut his optimism; Turner’s
oal is to survive Nickel by any
means necessary. The two boys’ friendship grows
as they harden, and soften, each other. As the novel
reveals itself, it becomes something closer toSag
Harbor, Whitehead’s 2009 meditation on growing up
black, middle class and frequently lost.
For moments, the implacable cruelty of the school
that holds Elwood and Turner becomes beside the
point. “There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s
brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that
had nothing to do with people,” Whitehead writes.
And it’s the quiet stretches, when they begin to learn
the difference between survival and living, that stay
with them longer than the beatings and murders. It
makes Whitehead’s point all the more heartbreaking:
The kids never stood a chance.Books
WHITEHEAD’S SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
The Eternal
Revolution of
Feminist Punk
The Nickel
Boys
Colson
Whitehead
DOUBLEDAY
$Colson Whitehead sets his excellent seventh novel inside the
institutional brutality of the Jim Crow SouthBy BR E N DA N K L I N K E N BE RGRevenge of the She-Punks
Vivien Goldman
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
4Man in the
Window
Paige St. John
#In the Seventies and Eighties, the “Golden State Killer,” Joseph James
DeAngelo Jr., terrorized California, committing more than a dozen murders
and over 50 rapes. It was one of the most horrific crime sprees in U.S. his-
tory, and it’s recounted in stomach-turning detail in the podcastMan in the
Window, hosted by L.A.Times criminal-justice reporter Paige St. John. Even
serious buffs will find fresh details and insights, but what sets it apart from other procedurals is
a dedication to the stories of women who survived their attacks — their memories of brusquely
administered rape kits, their activism protesting for harsher sexual-assault sentencing, and their
attempts to move on. “Partying helped,” recalls Kris McFarland, who was raped when she was- “Numb became a way of life.... Not a great survival story, right?”ANDREA MARKS
DeAngelo
in 2018
(left)
and in a
sketch.